And yet another item on the iPad? Are we serious? Yes, we are, since this one is about something that even geeks who aren't interested in the iPad itself should find intriguing. Steve Jobs said yesterday that the iPad is powered by an Apple A4 processor, but contrary to what many seem to think - it wasn't designed in-house at all.

I really don't understand why Thom presents Bright Side Of News's findings as facts, even though there are three clear hints that they may actually be false.

1.) They write the Cortex A9 was "identical to ones used in nVidia Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon", even though neither Tegra nor Snapdragon use a Cortex A9, which implies they are not as technically adept as they pretend to be.

2.) They say Apple uses an ARM Mali graphics processor and fail to realize that it would be at least remarkable if Apple really used a slower GPU than what they could buy from PowerVR, considering they own 10% of that company (Imagination Technologies).

Update #1, January 28, 2010 22:22 GMT/UTC - Following the request for comments, we were incline to update the story. First of all, we do not have concrete information about the number of cores inside the Apple A4 "CPU that it isn't" i.e. A4 SOC. We were told that the ARM licensed its CPU and GPU technology to Apple. That's it. Out of that technology, Cortex-A9 is intended for manufacturing in advanced manufacturing process such as 45nm, 40nm, 28nm and so on, while Cortex-A8 doesn't have advanced video processing capabilities that Cortex-A9 has. As the time progresses, we'll know more about what LEGO brick components did Apple use to create the A4. One thing is certain - it uses ARM IP throughout the silicon. Don't shoot the messenger.

yes - instead we should shoot the people which are unable to distinguish the boring message (a4 = arm soc) from utterly baseless but interesting speculation (cortex a9 + mali).

my own speculation: i wouldn't be surprised if this is just an arm cortex a8 + powervr sgx. same as in the iphone 3gs, just with a higher clock rate and maybe more cache and an apple-designed memory controller. but please don't report this as fact.

2.) They say Apple uses an ARM Mali graphics processor and fail to realize that it would be at least remarkable if Apple really used a slower GPU than what they could buy from PowerVR, considering they own 10% of that company (Imagination Technologies).

There is this thing called Time-To-Market. Since they did not go with an existing chip, they must have cut corners somewhere.

You have a problem with Goebbels abilities in the field of propaganda? They had at least half of Germany brainwashed for 12 years! If Jobs had even half of Goebbels talent, we would all use Macs.
Your point is as invalid, as stating that since Hitler was that bad, his artistic talents were negated.(He was a very talented painter BTW.)